Wag The Dog Overt Censorship

Within society, it is often difficult to distinguish what is actually true versus what is created and projected to the masses. With a successful campaign, there is no easy way to tell if it is deceiving or not and most of the time, people are easily subjected to taking campaigns for reality. This can be seen in the film Wag the Dog. It is a fictitious film that deals with the ways in which the media and government work together to fabricate news and distract the public from other matters (Wag the Dog, 1997). The film essentially focuses on the how the media and government work together to cover up a presidential sex scandal days before the election by creating a war (Wag the Dog, 1997). Examining Wag the Dog, through the conflict lens …show more content…
With relation to the media and the public, how information is presented and understood depends on a few crucial factors. These factors include overt versus covert censorship and also official versus folk reality. Terry Hansen clearly defines each of these in terms of how they relate to the public. Overt censorship occurs when the public is aware that news suppression is occurring, but exactly what is being suppressed is not known (Hansen, 2000). Covert censorship differs because both the media and public are unaware that information is being suppressed, however, elite news media companies often comply with these censorship programs willingly (Hansen, 2000). It could be argued that the use of this was prominent in the 1997 film, Wag the Dog. This would be due to the fact that a political public relations/media specialist worked alongside government workers in order to divert attention from one topic to another. The image or story …show more content…
Social influence refers to the fact that the power of culture and the media is to persuade the public into accepting the views as being in their best interest (Macaluso, 2016). The exercise of social control can be easily seen throughout Wag the Dog, as it allows those in power to use censorship to distract the masses from other issues at hand and the public believes this to be true, thus shifting their focus to “more crucial” matters. It is also vocalized as throughout the film it is referenced that if it was seen and heard on television, then it must be true (Wag the Dog, 1997). In a sense, the social control that they have allows them to control cultural production. With cultural production, if the specialized class produces the majority of media culture, then knowledge equals power and power equals knowledge (Macaluso, 2016). Therefore, by carefully constructing the official reality they project to the masses in Wag the Dog, the public takes their position of power as equaling their knowledge, meaning that it must be true. Since the covert censorship and official reality that was created in Wag the Dog, was a planned and executed campaign, it would have been impossible to detect when underway (Hansen, 2000). Due to the fact that the campaign was so well thought out, the public followed and believed what they were presented. Within the film, they used Albania as the